Tom Collins
Digital Director, Hoare Lea
Rachel Knight
Associate Data Scientist, Hoare Lea
Creating a culture of creativity using
data-driven insights.
PEOPLE
Fresh perspectives
New voices of the built environment
Partnering with technology and data apprenticeships provider Multiverse has meant that Hoare Lea is able to get to grips with data, learning how to collect it, analyse it and visualise it to build better environments. By harnessing this ability, we’re creating game changing approaches for our clients and the world around us.
Tom Collins
Joining Hoare Lea a few years ago was an exciting opportunity as it was my first time working in this industry. Knowing very little about engineering, I’ve had to lean on my experience in fintech, retail energy supply and digital performance marketing.
Throughout my career in digital, a common strand has emerged.
Whether you’re an individual looking to make well-informed personal finance decisions, or part of an engineering team working to optimise a building:
Data + Accessibility = Clarity and Action
So, if you bring together an evidence base – data – and structure it well, then couple it with intuitive and easy ways to interact with it, you end up with powerful insights that inform decision-making.
Just as knowing exactly where and how I spend my money each month can help me make better choices, knowing exactly how buildings operate in the real world can create much higher certainty in how we design building systems.
This year it’s been exciting to see how we’ve begun to embed this across Hoare Lea, creating a culture of curiosity, made possible through technology and skills investment. We have developed a new partnership with Multiverse to create a Data Academy and we are using this to develop new skills in our people across engineering, BIM and consultancy. This enables us to empower our teams to embrace data and use it to build an evidence base for better decision-making, as well as harness the latest in AI technology to achieve more for our clients.
Rachel Knight has taken a bold step in her career and embarked on the most advanced programme available as part of our Data Academy. I can’t wait to see how she plays a key role, working with our Digital team, in developing our evidence-based design capabilities.
Data is ubiquitous and the insights we can generate from data are incredibly powerful; however we have not yet unlocked its potential in the construction industry. Questions like ‘How do user behaviours impact building performance?’ can be answered through the application of machine learning.
Rachel Knight
After earning a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and spending ten years working as a Mechanical Engineer in the building services industry, I decided to make a significant career pivot earlier this year and transitioned away from ductulators and RIBA stages to the realm of 1’s and 0’s called data science.
My passion for problem-solving, working with numbers and conducting analysis led me to engineering; these same skills are essential in data science. I found great satisfaction in my engineering career, feeling that I was making a tangible difference and the work we aim to accomplish using data science in the built environment will have a similar impact.
Data is ubiquitous and the insights we can generate from data are incredibly powerful; however we have not yet unlocked its potential in the construction industry. Questions like ‘How do user behaviours impact building performance?’ can be answered through the application of machine learning. Hoare Lea wants to be at the forefront of this technologically evolving landscape, harnessing the power of data to better understand our clients, our buildings, and our environment. Additionally, we are in the midst of a climate crisis, where innovation and forward-thinking are required to mitigate the effects of a rapidly changing climate; thinking beyond traditional building design methods is our best chance of achieving Net Zero Carbon in our designs.
Working with Multiverse has been a great step towards Hoare Lea becoming a data-driven organisation. It’s helping us gain the skills to collect, analyse, and visualise data through a commercial lens. These skills are also helping us to develop tools to automate processes, allowing our engineers to focus on the exciting parts of their job—the engineering.
I’m enrolled in the Multiverse Data Academy, where I am learning a holistic approach to a data-driven business, including learning about data collection and storage to governance and ethics, and the part I’m most excited about—using machine learning to test design hypotheses. Our goal at Hoare Lea is to embed data at the heart of our operations and decision-making, ensuring that all employees have a grounding in core data skills, which the Data Academy is helping us achieve.
Tom Collins
Rachel’s story is one of countless others in our organisation who are now part of the Data Academy. The Academy is already making an impact directly on client projects, and we’re already seeing so many great stories shared by others.
The most exciting element for me is seeing how these new skills aren’t just expanding our collective toolbox but fostering an emerging culture of curiosity. With all this data in hand, and with the skills to make sense of it, we’re finding entirely new questions to ask because we have new ways to answer them. And that’s now on show with our clients too – with the clarity we can bring to the conversation, clients are now armed to make better decisions rather than look to us for singular answers.
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